"It has been put into poetry. Every flower that blooms on that field
is a poem far greater than I could write. There are some things too
great for me to attempt. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg is one of
them."

A lady who chanced to be on the boat with us repeated Owen Meredith's
poem of "The Portrait." At its close he said with sad earnestness, "I
am sorry to hear you recite that. Please never do it again. It is a
libel on womanhood."

It may be that he was thinking of "Ethel," the maiden whom, it is
said, he loved in his youth, from whom he parted because Heaven had
chosen them both for its own work, and his memories deepened the
sacredness with which all women were enshrined in his thought. She was
to be a nun and he a priest, and thus he tells of their parting:

One night in mid of May their faces met
As pure as all the stars that gazed on them.
They met to part from themselves and the world;
Their hearts just touched to separate and bleed;
Their eyes were linked in look, while saddest tears
Fell down, like rain, upon the cheeks of each:
They were to meet no more.

The "great brown, wond'ring eyes" of the girl went with him on his way
through life, shadowed like the lights of a dim cathedral, but
luminous with love and sacrifice. How much of the story he tells in
pathetic verse was his very own perhaps no one may ever know, but the
reader feels that it was Father Ryan himself who, after "years and
years and weary years," walked alone in a place of graves and found